12. CARL SAGAN: Make the most of this life

Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was an American astronomer, cosmologist, author and the coolest nerd ever. He was famous for making science accessible to anyone with half a brain. His 1980 documentary series, Cosmos, inspired a whole generation of people and I think it’s the greatest television series ever made. I only watched it for the first time five years ago (I wish I saw it when I was 14 instead of 24), but since then I’ve devoured all of Sagan’s books and watched Cosmos again about a thousand times. His work explained so much to me: the history of the cosmos, evolution, civilisation, the beauty of science, the perils of superstition and pseudoscience, the origin of religion – basically life, the universe and everything. Carl Sagan was the teacher I never had.

– Sagan wrote the above quote in an article for Parade magazine in 1996 while in hospital and facing death himself. It’s a beautiful article and you can read the whole thing here.
– I highly recommend you watch Cosmos (it’s on Youtube). Yes, It was made over 30 years ago and it looks a bit dated, but I can honestly say it was life-changing for me.
– If you don’t have a spare 13 hours, then these short 10-minute Sagan tribute clips edited by Milky Way Musings are a good place to start.
– Seth MacFarlane (yes, the Family Guy creator) and Neil deGrasse Tyson (often said to be this generation’s Carl Sagan) are making a Cosmos sequel that will air next year.
– I find Carl Sagan’s voice to be soothing and pleasantly hypnotic. Others think it sounds like Agent Smith from The Matrix.

I’m Indian and yep its totally like a sikh. No probs though.. Ur cartoons are too good. I think I’m gonna take you as an inspiration and will try the comical interpretations of poems cuz whenever I read a particular piece .. I always wanted express my opinions in some way.. writing appeared kind of corny to me. THis is cool.. Will try this stuff this summer itself. Thanks a lot. Keep drawing.

Are we to assume that the soldier is a Christian simply because of the widespread symbol of pearly gates and angel wings? The notion of pearly gates isn’t even as close to being destructive towards Christianity as the false and destructive stereotype of 7 virgins is to Islam. I’m not Muslim, but I know better than to falsely equivocate “pearly gates leisure centre” with Christianity in the same potency of stereotyping as the 7 doting virgins to Islam. I think you, sir, are the one who needs to get over yourself.

I’m also a big fan of Carl, and I totally agree with your comment on his voice. I’ve seen the DVDs for Cosmos in which each episode contains a prefix errata to correct where current science (at the time of the DVD production) corrects any facts stated.

Did your extensive reading also include his Novel? I haven’t actually read this, but I did enjoy watching the movie adaption (Jodie Foster starring).

Cosmos was one of my favorite documentaries. I particularly liked his big calendar where the Big Band was on January 1st, Life on Earth around December and man’s total recorded history in the last few seconds before midnight on December 31st.

It certainly was, that’s when I first watched it. I thought I was in High School at the time, but IMDB says it was released in 1980, so I must have watched it while I was in College (probably 1st year). But definitely early 80’s. I even bought the Vinyl LP soundtrack so pre-CD era, and it was most likely on ABC.

Actually, Carl wrote quite a few books. But, if you’re referring to Contact (of course), I read it. Frankly, Hollywood once again butchered a master work with their treatment of it, though not as horribly as HeinLein’s Starship Troopers.
It’s a rare thing when Hollywood doesn’t turn a jewel into a lump of coal.

You are aware that Carl was involved in that production, right? They worked closely with him on the shape of the story. It’s doubtful he would have thought it as “butchered” as you did. I read the book before the film and I thought they did a great job. Books and films, dude. Different media, different treatments.

In the book science triumphed over faith when they found a binary message hidden in Pi.
In the movie faith triumphed over science when people believed in her story when she didn’t have a shred of evidence to support her claims.

I have some real problems believing that Carl Sagan would actually agree on such an end. But this is just my feeling.

But the hours and hours of recorded static she brought back supported the claim although not in as obvious a way as a binary message in pi. I don’t think faith triumphed at all. (That part always gives me goosebumps.)

This is wonderful. You have used Carl’s Big Words and pretty much the World Events of the last 10 years to tell a story that is ultimately about individuals improving their lives. Keep it up; you’re a genius!

As Dr. Plait says, Carl Sagan “had a way with words that made them not just profound, not just inspiring, but also warm and rich and enveloping.” I fully agree with that sentiment, and think that everyone should read his books. Even if they already have a Ph.D. in Baloney Detection, they should read his words just because of the great way he says things.

By the way, Ann is teaming with Neil deGrasse Tyson to update the Cosmos series. I know when I showed it to my daughter, she was put off a bit by it’s very antiquated special effects. Kids these days…

The Prophet Muhammad was heard saying: “The smallest reward for the people of Paradise is an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine, and ruby, as wide as the distance from Al-Jabiyyah [a Damascus suburb] to Sana’a [Yemen]”

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This is as a weak Hadith that has no Sanad — line or sequence of narration. Although listed in an authoritative collection, this particular Hadith has technical weaknesses in its chain of transmitters and is therefore not considered impeccable. As a result, Muslims are not required to believe in it. Even if the Hadith was true, there is nothing about it that says that if someone commits suicide they would get 72 virgins in paradise.

This just made me misty-eyed during my morning commute. It’s so wonderful. I first encountered Sagan during college years, and at almost every profound sentence I would say: this man gets it. He’s my spiritual, science teacher unofficially.

Wow. Thank you so so much for this. This is the greatest message on peace ever; put into a very hard-hitting, touching illustration. You have been doing a phenomenal job.

Btw, as pointed by the guy above, the link to the sagan’s letter is broken. “Sagan wrote the above quote in an article for Parade magazine in 1996 while in hospital and facing death himself. It’s a beautiful article and you can read the whole thing here.”

Wow. Thank you so so much for this. This is the greatest message on peace ever; put into a very hard-hitting, touching illustration. You have been doing a phenomenal job.

Btw, as pointed by the guy above, the link to the sagan’s letter is broken. “Sagan wrote the above quote in an article for Parade magazine in 1996 while in hospital and facing death himself. It’s a beautiful article and you can read the whole thing here.”

I’ve browsed through all your work. And I can’t help but appreciate the marvel of your work. I’m in my own life journey in pursuing graduate school, leaving behind my family and loved ones in the Philippines, and taking on a challenging trip as I try to sharpen my research work.

Your illustrations of quotes through cartoons are amazing, inspiring, and uplifting. Your cartoons just made my day on this quiet Sunday morning.

I hope you continue to keep inspiring more people like me with your work.

I,ve been having a rough couple of months dealing with an ultra spiritual/religious and pushy crowd at work (my boss included!!!), I started feeling quite lonely in my belief of an unique and marvelous chance to be alive in this moment and my lack of faith in the supernatural forces that my coworkers claim control my destiny. Somehow I wasn’t familiar with Carl Sagan’s work. Trough your amazing work today I go to bed with the certainty of not being alone in my viewing of the world’s functioning and the bliss of having been introduced to an amazing man who even in death will be a dear company. I guess the man did got some kind of inmortality after all.

I saw this comic on another blog and it drew me to your work for the first time.

I’m a chemist on my 3rd deployment in Afghanistan (and an Atheist) so this quote, it’s author and the subject matter all made a tremendous impact.

It’s sad to see people who deliberately cast off the burden of tolerance and understanding and cloister themselves in a life of ignorance or are manipulated to commit heinous acts against others for the reward of life after death.

In the most simple ways, we are all the same people and I believe strongly in appreciating life BEFORE death.

I love the idea, and I love Sagan, but the problem I have with this cartoon is the implication of moral equivalency between the Western soldier and the Middle Eastern fighter. It seems to me, and maybe I’m wrong, that the illustrator is implicitly asserting that both men are fighting one another for the same ostensibly idiotic reason. This equivalency erases the very real threat the US military and other Western powers pose to countries of the Middle East. The US in particular has waged a hand-full of illegal wars of aggression in the past 15 years, while violating the sovereignty of even more countries with drone strikes, and inducing humanitarian disaster with sanctions. While many Middle Eastern regimes are no doubt tyrannical, the US government (and by extension this soldier) has no right whatsoever to act with such callous belligerence, whereas it is the right of every person guaranteed by international law to resist occupation by any means, including violence directed at military targets. To place these two men next to each other makes their actions seem equivalent when they surely aren’t, and to equate their motivations and label them purely religious is to rob the situation of its context.

The quote is very interesting. I have a problem with the implied message of the cartoon though. It reminds me of a conversation I just had with someone:
they said something similar to this cartoon: ”

So if it weren’t for God, the Native Americans would still be alive, the Africans would never have been enslaved, the Asians would never have been coerced into building our railroads and then have all their wealth taken away as they were sent to internment camps, we wouldn’t have problems allowing peaceful Muslims to build places of worship, and we’d wouldn’t disown our children because they turn out to? be homosexual, condemning them to a dangerous unloved childhood.

Yea no. God’s not evil.”

And the cartoon implies that without religion, people wouldn’t go to war.

To that I ask: is there any historical precedent for “purely-secular” nations [if you can even say that has ever existed]? behaving “better” than their counterparts?

Or put another way: Lets pretend that the religions of Europe didn’t exist when? the period of world-wide imperialism began. Would that have stopped now purely nationalist/capitalist forces from taking advantage of other races whenever possible?

More of your awesomeness!! You make me hope for the world. You and my 20 year old son who reveres Sagan too. Sometimes I get sad about the state of humanity. Don’t we all; then I find a website like yours, and hear my son talk about space missions, and the Kepler mission and I start to think that perhaps mankind will be o.k for some time. Perhaps.

First off, I’d like to say that I LOVE your comics. I use them in my high school classes regularly for all sorts of topics. They are incredibly useful for helping teenagers understand complex, deeper topics. Thank you.

Once I read this comic, I had mixed feelings. I have one class with very strong views on Islamophobia (and all the stereotypes that go along with it), and I know that if they stumbled upon this comic when browsing your blog that they’d be disappointed.

Now, I’d just like to say why without everyone freaking out (which everyone reading the comments might have noticed happened above, with the first comment… yikes!). There are two things:

– Firstly, the afterlife depictions: there’s quite a lot more to the Muslim conception of Heaven than 72 virgins! Just as there’s quite a lot more to the Christian conception of Heaven than harp lessons. I figure you were likely making a parody of each by boiling them down into basic popular conceptions of either faith’s “Heaven”… but I don’t believe this was explicit enough. The depiction instead reinforced negative stereotypes.

– Secondly, why was it the Christian who initiated peace? And why is it the Muslim who we expect to deceptively pull a weapon out once peace is initiated? I would have been so happy to see this flipped, and work against current popular ideas of the untrustworthy violent terrorist.

– Thirdly… and I know I only had two things, but this just occurred to me and I think it’s JUST as if not MORE important than the above two! I know it can be difficult for a blogger to respond to everyone’s comments on their postings… but why not respond to a couple of your fans concerned about the unintentional Islamophobia in this comic? I saw you responded to a wide range of topics, including the turban mix up, but not to anyone mentioning the virgins (lol funny how we see those women as “the virgins”, eh? Just realized my own assumptions!).

That’s my schtick! I don’t mean it to be disrespectful. And I honestly do love your comics, my students love them, and I think I’ll be showing them this comic during Tuesday’s lesson (on underlying + overt racial stereotypes in media). So thank you 🙂 we can use your comics in literally every sort of way now — including deconstruction and critique. It’s good for them to see the multifaceted nature of a person’s work. You might be getting quite a LOT of messages to respond to soon!!

If he flips the comic he loses the opportunity to illustrate that the expectation of the Muslim being the bad guy was wrong. This piece is not Islamophobic – it is anti-stereotype. It’s a little disheartening that recently I have seen several works that have been sympathetic to Muslims that were immediately viewed as Islamophobic.

Though really it is about understanding what an opportunity life is, every day, and not wasting it.

I’m happy I located this blog! From time to time, students want to cognitive the keys of productive literary essays composing. Your first-class knowledge about this good post can become a proper basis for such people.

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The quote is very interesting. I have a problem with the implied message of the cartoon though. It reminds me of a conversation I just had with someone:
they said something similar to this cartoon..http://worthreview.com

The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and using it for criminal purposes and all the different things that people do. The people who invented pagers, for instance, never imagined that they would change the shape of urban drug dealing all over the world